Chris Lee stands in his kitchen next to an R2D2 top he made in his East Nashville home. Lee and fellow 'Star Wars' fans around the world are trying build a life-size replica of the film's spacecraft.

Written by

Michael Cass
| The Tennessean

Chris Lee's first thought after seeing the Millennium Falcon was a bit different from Luke Skywalker's.

"When they walk down the stairs into the docking bay and Luke looks up and goes, 'What a piece of junk!' - as soon as he said that, I had the opposite reaction," Lee said. "I was like, 'It's not a piece of junk. It's the coolest thing I've ever seen. I've got to have me one of these!' "

Lee's dream, hatched when he was a 12-year-old watching the first "Star Wars" movie at the old Cinema North theater near RiverGate Mall in 1977, wasn't simply a boyhood fantasy. It just might come true one day. ...